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Icons of the New Evangelicalism
...Over the past two decades, the old leaders of American evangelicalism have managed to swap the future of their sect for political clout. An acute observer of American society once said something quite profound about the effects that ensue when faith and politics enter into the kind of unholy alliance the United States has recently seen. “There have been religions intimately linked to earthly governments, dominating men’s souls by terror and by faith,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835, “but when a religion makes such an alliance, I am not afraid to say that it … sacrifices the future for the present, and by gaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks its legitimate authority.” Does this insight apply today? Given the many signs of crisis—Newsweek has already declared the U.S. to be “post-evangelical”—it may not be entirely misguided to conclude that we are witnessing evangelicalism’s fall from the American power elite.

Tocqueville also had a theory about how this loss of authority happens. “When [religion] is mingled with the bitter passions of this world, it is sometimes constrained to defend allies who are such from interest rather than from love; and it has to repulse as adversaries men who still love religion, although they are fighting against religion’s allies. Hence religion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity aroused against them.”...